How To Make Money from Your Empty Space

Side Hustle Series – Make Money From Your Empty Space

Did you know if you have a driveway, garage or carport that you are not using, you can make money from it?

We chatted with Daniel Battaglia of Parksy who is based in Sydney, New South Wales about a cool side hustle you can do and asked him about the process of it being a side hustle for him.

He launched Parksy as a side hustle and you can find his advice on how to use Parksy to make some money as well as his challenges and achievements running Parksy.

There is some great information you can apply to any side hustle or business.

What is Parksy?

Parksy is a parking marketplace where people rent out their unused driveway, garage or carport to drivers who need somewhere to park.

It’s free to list a space, free to search and free to contact others. Check out how, plus a bonus here.

We also publish free tools for drivers, including an AI parking fine appeal calculator, a Find My Car tool and guides on parking rules and signs.

Why Did You Start Parksy?

It was a problem I had.

I was circling Paddington looking for parking, driving past driveway after empty driveway, and it seemed absurd that all that space sat unused while people paid a fortune to park badly nearby.

It also needed almost no money to start.

No stock, no warehouse, no staff. Just a website and the patience to fill it.

I started it in 2011, as Parking Made Easy in Australia, then a North American site, and last year I consolidated everything into Parksy, which now covers 57 countries.

How Much Can People Make?

As a side hustle, it is an easy one because it costs nothing to start and most people make $200 to $400 per month for their space.

The price can vary depending on location, ease of access, size etc.

What Advice Do You Have For Others?

If you have a driveway or a garage you don’t use, list it.

It takes ten minutes and it’s free, and it’s about the lowest-effort passive income going.

You don’t need to be home, you don’t need to do anything, you’re renting space you already pay for.

If you mean starting something of your own more broadly: pick a problem you personally have, because you’ll need to still care about it in year five.

Keep your fixed costs near zero so time is the only thing you’re spending. And launch before it’s ready.

The version I was embarrassed by taught me more than another six months of polishing would have.

Why Did You Want a Side Hustle?

I was working in banking (Macquarie, then RBC and Lehman Brothers ) and I wanted something that was mine.

Not a second salary exactly, more the ability to build something that kept working when I wasn’t at a desk.

Watching Lehman collapse from the inside teaches you fairly quickly that a single employer is not a plan.

What Did You Need to Make it Grow?

Content, mostly. Answering the questions drivers actually type into Google: how to appeal a fine, what a sign means, where to park near a stadium.

That brings people in without an ad budget, which matters when you’re bootstrapped.

More recently, AI tooling has changed what one person can do. I

rebuilt and migrated the entire platform myself using it, which would have needed a dev team a few years ago.

I also work with a small offshore team on the parts that don’t need me.

How Does It Take?

For those renting their space, it doesn’t take long to list it then you really only need hand over the keys and that’s it.

In terms of time and effort, it is about as minimal as you can get.

As for me running Parksy, early on, all the daytime, evenings and weekends – it was an unpaid full-time job.

These days it’s most nights and a decent chunk of every weekend. I won’t pretend that’s balanced. It’s the honest answer.

I also have a job part-time to help run an auto parts ecommerce business.

How much money do you make per month or year (on average)?

It earned almost nothing for years before becoming meaningful, and it now covers its own costs and pays for itself.

People on the website will rent their parking spaces typically from $200 to $400 monthly.

What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome those?

The first was money, or the lack of it. For a long stretch it made close to nothing, and the only way through was keeping costs so low that being early didn’t kill it.

Staying bootstrapped cost me speed, but it bought survival.

The second was technical. The platform sat on ageing software for close to a decade and had to be rebuilt from the ground up.

I did that migration myself, in production, with no team. AI 10X the output at less than 10X the cost.

The third is the quiet one: doing something for years while people politely ask how the parking thing is going. You need a reason to keep going that isn’t external validation.

What have been your biggest achievements or happy moments through your journey?

Writing the book (Parking Made Easy: Making Life Easier) was a moment.

So was the first time a stranger emailed to say they’d won a fine appeal using our free calculator, and the first time someone told me the money from renting out their driveway covered their rates.

The media coverage is nice for the ego, but the emails from people who saved money are the ones I keep.